Hey there undergrads, hope you’re enjoying your glimpse into the glamorous work lives of your esteemed alumni. Though to be honest, my workday was not all that glamorous today as my office, and most of the city of Washington, D.C. in fact, has been in “snowpocalypse” mode, meaning streets are unplowed, schools are shut, and the federal government is closed. And despite my alleged snow day, I was busy working from home.

I’m the Special Projects editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine, which is a catch-all title that essentially means I do a little bit of everything in the office: Writing features and shorter stories for the magazine, editing magazine sections and our award winning blog, blogging for said blog, running our social media accounts, and organizing cross-platform editorial projects (what are cross-divisional editorial projects, you ask? I’ll get to that in a sec).

I came here after getting my Masters in Journalism from NYU and working for several years as a reporter at New York Magazine, and have been at Traveler for just over two years. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s an interesting time to be in media these days, with magazines shuttering left and right, and the newspaper industry in crisis mode, looking for the magic solution that will ‘monetize’ online content. What that means for us, and for me in particular, is to look for opportunities to expand our reach. Thankfully, we have some serious brand-recognition on our side, so an important part of what we’re all doing now is looking to make sure that the National Geographic magazines that you think of as belonging to your parents and grandparents are just as relevant—and as widely read–by younger generations. So that’s a big part of what I do.

So what did I do today, at home, at my kitchen table in between bites of leftover lasagna? (which I made to ensure I’d have food around given the snowmaggedon.) I wrote a blog post, did two interviews for upcoming stories, answered over 50 emails (from an office that was closed), wrote up a series of hotel listings for an upcoming magazine issue, and researched another upcoming assignment for the magazine. I corresponded with a tourism rep from Ottawa, where I’ll be traveling this week on assignment, and went back and forth with my editor about the appropriate use of exclamation points (never). I reviewed a memo for an internal think-tank I help coordinate for NG staffers. And I edited, uploaded videos, downloaded photos, and published the next post in a cross-divisional editorial project that we’re running right now called Bus2Antarctica, which involves one of our writers traveling by bus from our DC headquarters through the length of Central and South America, all the way to, yes, Antarctica. It’s a fabulous project, and I highly encourage you all to follow along. http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/admin/mt-search.cgi?tag=Bus2Antarctica&blog_id=74&IncludeBlogs=74

Tomorrow, I’m going into the office despite it being closed, in an attempt to help have the magazine published on time. Stay tuned…